It's possible you were banned by
mistake, in which case you should read this page and then contact
us explaining your situation. If you were banned intentionally, this
page tells you why.

It is also possible that
you are connecting to the site via a proxy server. According to our
rules, this may result in you not having access to the forums. We
suggest you try to connect directly in this case.

We are aware that some folks don't take the time to actually read the forum rules.
That's a shame but it's not our fault. In any case we make it obvious before
you register. Remember the summary of rules you agreed to (screenshot
below)?

The Banning FAQ

Why have such harsh rules, and why ban people without warning them?

In a nutshell, the spam problem is so bad we have no choice. Forum-spam
works in a similar way to email spam, except that the spammers post messages
in forums.

In the good old days, forum spammers were mostly automated so email
validation and CAPTCHA security kept most of them out. These days the
spammers employ real people to manually post spam messages. No amount of
automated tests can stop them because they are just as real as genuine
members.

Forum spam is often quite sophisticated. For example, a spammer may post a
message that appears to be a genuine question such as "I've heard about this
product and it seems to have good reviews. Does anyone know anything about
it?" Sometimes the spammer registers two or three additional usernames in
order to reply to their own question with glowing recommendations.

Another common trick is to post a "helpful tutorial" that just happens to
include links to the spammer's products.

All of this wouldn't be so bad if the products were good, but they usually
aren't. Often they are complete scams. We need to protect our genuine
members—not to mention the fact that our forum would begin to resemble a
trash heap if we let
spammers loose.

We can't warn spammers because they don't want to post anything other than
spam, so they just post as much as they can until we ban them.

But my message wasn't spam, it was just [insert description here]

We deal with so much spam that some genuine messages get wrongly identified,
just like email spam filters. Let us know what your message was about and
we'll talk.

What if I have a genuine product or website that your visitors would like
to know about?

We do make exceptions so feel free to
contact us and discuss it. However in most cases we will ask you to
follow the normal protocol that everyone else uses. Here's how it works....

Many of our members promote themselves through our forums by putting their
URL in their signature link. We also allow regular contributors to recommend
their own websites and products (within reason). Those who participate a lot
and have good websites get good traffic from us. The catch is that you have
to be a genuine participant. You need to get involved in the forum, help
answer questions or just chat in the discussions. This shows that you are
are a genuine person, willing to make a fair contribution in return for the
promotion you'll get. If this doesn't sound like a good deal, we're sorry to
have wasted your time but that's just how it is.

By the way, don't think that you can get away with posting a few messages
saying nothing more than "me too" or "yes, I agree". This is a common
spammer trick to get their post count up. Unless we've agreed to an
exception, only genuine participants can promote themselves and have access
to other areas such as the Marketplace.

Either none of this applies to me, or I made a genuine mistake and I'm
sorry

Cool. If you still want to be part of the forum, contact
us with your username and we'll talk. Despite the tone of this page,
we're actually quite nice people. We understand that you may have just been
really excited about something you couldn't wait to tell everyone, so you
forgot to read the rules properly. If you say sorry and you're willing to
abide by our rules, we'll reinstate you and forget this ever happened.